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‘Cressida?’ Kitty Alasdair’s no-nonsense tone was unmistakable.

Cressida turned to find her sister-in-law standing in the hallway.

She felt hunted in one moment and foolish relief the next.

The row with Annis must have been audible from the drawing room, and probably the blow, too.

Kitty raised both eyebrows as if to warn Cressida she could not escape the reckoning that was due between them for much longer. Christ.

Kitty’s gaze flickered away from hers, and Cressida turned to face Roberts, who stood watching with her high-coloured face devoid of expression.

‘Can I help, ma’am?’ Roberts said to Kitty, talking past Cressida. ‘Is something amiss?’

‘Nothing at all,’ Cressida said. ‘Lady Alasdair and I are going outside to look at the St Elmo’s fire.’

‘I doubt you’ll see any this evening, ma’am,’ Roberts said, equal parts deference and hostility.

‘We’ll take our chances.’ Cressida smiled, waiting for her to open the door.

Outside, they walked in silence to the edge of the lawn, pea-gravel crunching beneath their feet, the surface of the loch shining through a gap in the plantation.

In the cooler air Cressida’s cheek stung where Annis had struck her.

‘Goodness, isn’t it beautiful here?’ Kitty said, smiling out at the water with no sign that she must have at least heard raised voices. ‘It’s like another world.’

So, they were doing yet more commonplaces. ‘A fairy realm, yes. That’s what I always used to think when we came over from Ireland when I was a little girl. Roberts still hates me, as you can see.’ Cressida tugged the gold-threaded Kashmiri wrap closer around her shoulders.

‘Who can blame her?’ Kitty folded satin-gloved arms across her chest. ‘If a servant behaved as you did, she’d be dead on the streets or on the gallows for theft within a few months. Roberts is from a local family, is she not?’

‘Yes. They came from a different part of the Highlands – quite far inland. Annis petitioned Bute to move them here to make a more honest and useful living – her words, not mine. Roberts usually spreads cheer and delight in town instead, but Annis is cutting corners in the servants’ hall and so here she is. ’

‘Bright women with little education and even less occupation are the very devil,’ Kitty said, and Cressida felt the warm flare of the old companionship between them, which Kitty then ruined by asking where Cressida had left her common sense.

‘I wish you had just come to Mama the moment you set foot on English soil,’ Kitty said, staring angrily out across the loch.

‘How much of a monster do you actually think me?’ Cressida demanded, distracted by a cold trickle of awareness: were they being watched?

‘I wish you would finally understand that some of us actually care what happens to you, Cressida,’ Kitty said.

‘Annis doesn’t have your best interests at heart and, if you ask me, she never did.

When you were a girl it was so obvious to everyone how deeply she resented every penny she deigned to spend on your behalf.

And very few people know of this, but Bute wasn’t Annis’s first choice. ’

‘What has that to do with anything?’ Cressida said, irritably glancing over her shoulder, back towards the house, unable to shake the instinct that they were both under observation; the last thing she wanted to do was dwell on Annis’s romantic affairs.

Kitty flushed. ‘Quite a lot, I’ve always thought.

When you were just a child and still in Ireland, Annis came quite close to marrying Crauford.

You never knew that, did you? Crauford was young – not much older than Jamie and Chas are now.

Mama especially didn’t quite like the match, and so our father advised Crauford to look elsewhere before two dances developed into an understanding between them.

Annis was never overjoyed at having you on her hands as I’m sure you knew only too well, but when you married into our family, you succeeded where she’d failed—’ Kitty broke off.

‘Cressida, after this house party is over, I sincerely hope you’ll come with me to Summercourt as Mama’s guest.’

‘A necrotic limb is always best removed lest it kill the rest. Hush.’ Placing one hand on Kitty’s slender arm, Cressida turned to the plantation just as the crack of a snapped twig rang out, followed by a muffled sob.

Cressida moved first. She held up a hand for silence and Kitty advanced behind, holding her skirts out of the damp grass.

Another sob rang out as they neared the stand of Scots pine, and Cressida dropped into a squat by a fuchsia bush that had gone wild, bursting forth from the bracken with spray after spray of plump pink-streaked flowers.

The bush shuddered. Kitty would have to wait.

‘Come out.’ Cressida spoke in a tone that left no room for argument. The girl emerged from the tangle of fuchsia and fresh green bracken on her hands and knees, clad in a sturdy worsted gown with a hand-knitted shawl around her shoulders, her face tear-stained.

‘Who does this child belong to?’ Kitty demanded, turning to cast an accusatory glance back over her shoulder at the house.

‘I’ve no idea. I’m fairly sure she’s a Tait, though.’ Cressida turned to the girl, who flushed scarlet. ‘Come now: what’s your name and what are you doing out here at this hour? You work in the house, don’t you?’

The girl dipped another curtsey, showing Cressida a bold look from behind her tangle of red hair.

‘My name is Lilias Tait, ma’am. I’m sorry, I hid when I heard you coming.

’ She glanced at the grass at their feet.

‘I do work in the big house but I don’t lodge there – I go away home each night to help my grandmother.

She’s old, and she can’t do for herself. Only tonight, I didn’t go. I couldn’t.’

‘Well, we’ll tell no tales,’ Cressida said, her gaze travelling irresistibly out across the glittering surface of the loch, away towards the open ocean. ‘Why are you still here? Will your grandmother not be worrying for you?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t go because I was afraid.’

‘Because you had to walk all the way home by yourself?’ Kitty demanded, with a sharp glance at Cressida. ‘Where do you live?’

Lilias turned to the loch, tugging the home-knitted shawl tighter around her shoulders. ‘In one of the wee houses on the loch-side, milady. In fairness, I walk home every night along the path, but I—’ She broke off: it was an admirable performance all round.

‘Go on,’ Kitty said, with the same brisk gentleness she would have employed had the girl scalded herself in the laundry room. ‘What happened to frighten you? Anyone can see you’re not one to startle at some silly trifle.’

Lilias swallowed, glancing down at her boots, unconsciously fidgeting with the skirts of her gown: a liar’s move.

‘I know it’s only stories, milady,’ she said, facing Kitty now with a wide-eyed stare.

‘But they do say there’s a presence on that path after dark.

I don’t believe in such unchristian stories, only the night before last when I went home I was sure there was someone else on the path with me.

Except every time I turned back to look over my shoulder there was no one there. ’

‘I don’t believe in ghosts either, but how unpleasant all the same,’ Kitty said, darting another quick glance at Cressida. ‘Must you really go alone?’

Lilias bowed her head, but not before Cressida glimpsed the flash of suppressed scorn in her eyes.

‘I could never put Tam or Stuart to the bother, thank you, milady, and I’d catch it if I tried.

There is no one at the house this evening who doesn’t have their work cut out.

But you ladies should go back up to the house. It’s hardly safe out here tonight.’

Kitty frowned. ‘Someone must accompany you home, Lilias – if there is some footpad or desperate person in the area, it’s no safer for you than it is for us.’

Lilias was now engaged in shoving at the pebbles with one booted foot in between maintaining a watch down the loch.

If she was really afraid of someone on the path, why was her attention fixed out on the water?

Following Lilias’s gaze, Cressida spotted the long, low line of MacGuigan’s cutter, a faint blur on the horizon: he was still cruising up and down the loch-head, then.

She’d lay a monkey that Lilias herself had made the same observation.

‘Milady?’ Lilias Tait said to Cressida, still doing her best to pretend she wasn’t watching MacGuigan’s cutter, which was now sliding south across the loch, away from the narrows that led out towards the North Atlantic and the Pentland Firth. ‘What shall I do?’

‘Just be quiet, if you can bear it.’ Cressida turned to Kitty, switching to French.

‘The girl’s right, you should just go back to the house – you’re of no use here.’

‘You can be as vile as you please, but you and I will still have a proper conversation about your future, Cressida, whether you like it or not,’ Kitty retorted in the perfectly accented French she’d learned from the Parisian governess Sylvia had insisted upon for all her girls.

‘Listen,’ Cressida said to Kitty, switching back to English, not bothering to disguise her irritation.

‘I’ll walk the child home: I knew her grandmother when I was a girl and the path is easy to follow.

’ This was greeted with stunned silence by Lilias and Kitty alike.

A single tern took off from the far side of the loch, rising up, wingbeat after wingbeat, a white reflection on the beaten silver water.

Kitty found her voice first, but not before reverting to French again. ‘Don’t be absurd, Cressida. How can you possibly? Listen, we’re both angry but you and I must speak—’

Cressida smiled. ‘I’m a married woman, Kitty – hardly a debutante straight out of the schoolroom. It won’t be dark for hours. And you must admit that Annis won’t be able to send anyone.’

Their eyes met as she spoke Annis’s name.

‘You can’t.’ Kitty opened her mouth, then closed it again as she realised who she was speaking to. ‘What if it really isn’t safe?’

‘I’m hardly planning to cross Covent Garden in the middle of the night.

’ Cressida replied sweetly, quite sure that Lilias had been lying about her fears, and that as the mother of young children still in the nursery Kitty knew that too.

She’d be damned if the girl hadn’t meant to keep them away from the path and away from the loch altogether, which only made an early evening walk along it a more attractive proposition.

‘Come along, Miss Tait,’ she said, speaking now in English.

‘If I remember your grandmother, she won’t be delighted at your tardiness. ’

*

Cressida gave orders for Lilias to walk ahead of her along the path that skirted the western reaches of Loch Iffrin.

The child picked her way over tussocks and ridges of mud thick with pine needles, moving with deft speed in fourth-hand hobnailed boots, her long red hair loose and uncovered in such a way that would have marked her price in the Peninsula, even at twelve summers old.

On their left-hand side, a tangle of bracken, saplings and scrub gave way to a sheer, granite drop down to the water: the tide was fairly high already.

Across the water, the seaweed-clad lower slopes of Eilean nam Fiadh were almost completely concealed by swirling dark water as the tide pooled.

To the right, young beech and pine trees reached for the summer sky of the far north.

Lilias turned, her freckled face a little flushed with the walk. Her gaze shifted, wary. ‘You need not come any further with me, ma’am. I shouldn’t have put you to this much trouble in the first place. I’ll go the rest of the way home myself.’

Cressida smiled cheerfully. ‘The devil you will, my dear. So when exactly are we to experience this spectre? Here, or a little further up the path?’

‘I don’t know that we will, ma’am,’ Lilias said, with a flare of sly scorn.

‘Doubtless it was just a pack-trader I heard hiding in the bushes the last time I came this way – like as not the man was drunk. I – I wish you’d just let me go on alone.

I’ll be skelped for putting your ladyship to all this trouble. ’

‘If you’ve any sense in that head, you’d fear a pack-trader far more than any phantom.

Coming upon a man alone and without protection is by far the most dangerous thing that might happen to you or me, so let’s hear no more of this melodrama about ghosts,’ Cressida said, not unkindly.

‘The next time some tuppence ha’penny free-trader orders you to stir up gossip about phantoms among the fools above stairs, do make a better fist of it, especially with Mr MacGuigan scenting blood as he is doing.

You’ll all need to make very sure that no intrepid guest travels this path at night, won’t you? What is it, whisky or salt?’

Lilias’s mouth fell open and she reached convulsively for her apron, twisting the faded linen in her fingers, obviously a childhood habit she hadn’t quite let go of. ‘Ma’am—’

‘Don’t stand there and lie to my head,’ Cressida said, pleasantly.

‘I couldn’t give a flying damn if my cousin’s entire household is otherwise employed with some sort of bloody predictable free-trading scam.

It might be salt, I suppose, but let’s face it, it’s probably whisky, considering they’ve banned distilling again completely this year. I don’t care. Who is this spectre?’

Lilias shrugged, looking sideways at Cressida.

‘They call him the Gentleman, but I don’t know who he is.

None of us do. And, mistress, truth be told I think my cousin Oliver and everyone else here are fools to have anything to do with him.

It’s not to do with whisky, I’m sure. Why would they caulk all the barrels with pitch if they were only free-trading that?

They never do, usually. How can they trust this Gentleman anyway?

Whoever he is, he’s like to be English, with a name like that.

’ Lilias bit off the end of her sentence, but her chin was set firm.

‘You think it’s foolishness, having anything to do with this person?’ Cressida probed. ‘But because you’re a lass, and only twelve, no one ever listens to you?’

‘Thirteen, mistress.’ Lilias pushed at the gravel with the toe of her boot. ‘And I think it’s like to lead to the gallows, myself.’

‘More so than common or garden free-trading?’ Cressida asked.

‘I suppose you’re right. But if you’re going to get caught up in this sort of mess whether you like it or not, you’d better become a sight better at lying, do you understand?

Shall we go on? Your grandmother will indeed be wondering where you are, and I’d as lief get back to the house to join everyone for supper, if that suits your convenience? ’

Lilias opened her mouth and then closed it again. ‘Yes, ma’am.’